Ten Uses For Old Telephone Boxes!

A couple of years ago when British Telecom decommissioned the public telephone box in our village, we had a discussion about what to do with it. Given that we are a relatively isolated rural community with few facilities and that we are also a bunch of avid readers, the outcome was probably inevitable. Yes, we turned it into a library. Here it is!

Very soon the box filled up with copies of everything from Herodotus to Dick Francis, Cornwell to Cornick. Finding a copy of my own book Kidnapped there was was a rather odd experience. "Oh I see," I said huffily to my dh. "Someone has given my book away to the library!" "Someone liked it enough to want to share it," he said soothingly. Somebody else borrowed it and it never came back. There are no library fines or set borrowing periods so it is turning into a book swap as well as a borrowing service. But the stock levels remain pretty high.

Now we need some new shelves because our collection is growing. We've also started to write recommendations on the white board. "If you enjoyed Elizabeth Chadwick's fabulous historical "To Defy a King" then you might enjoy Susan Fraser King's breathtaking novel "Queen Hereafter." That sort of thing. There are a lot of fans of historicals around here. And the great thing is that we then go off and buy more books by new-to-us authors so it's proving to be a good way of stimulating both reading and book-buying in this area. It's even feeding into the local book group.

Our experience with our phone box led me to wonder what other imaginative ideas people had come up with when their phone boxes were decomissioned. I've come across lots of ideas: Art gallery, tourist information point, poetry reading centre, and a phone box featuring a mannequin dressed as a regularly changing seasonal, historical or fictitious character suggested by the children of the local primary school! Someone even turned theirs into a public toilet, something which many villages lack and need, especially if they are in a tourist area. (Or, to quote my dh again: "Sadly a lot of people used phone boxes for that purpose anyway so they might as well turn it into an official loo!")

Now the phone box in the next village is available for conversion so we are looking for ideas for what to do with that one…

©2011 Nicola Cornick. All Rights Reserved.

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